Dave Matthews Band finds and loses its jam-band groove in Dallas concert

The Dave Matthews Band holds a curious position in music. It’s the jam band that’s much better when it isn’t jamming.

Matthews and his motley crew – who played to a surprisingly young crowd of nearly 20,000 fans Saturday night at Gexa Energy Pavilion – have a knack for 4-minute hits marked by offbeat melodies, disparate influences (country, jazz, Celtic) and one of the most ethereal male voices in rock.

But when it strays from songs into solos is when things start to get iffy. Clocking in at nearly three hours, the concert was brimming with jams of such wildly varying quality the show felt like a marathon see-saw ride.

Lead guitarist Tim Reynolds – Matthews’ longtime collaborator who joined the band full-time in 2008 – leaned heavily on tired blues-rock phrases and empty quests for speed during his solos. Fiddler Boyd Tinsley added a jazzy hoedown flair, and the faster he sawed, the louder the crowd roared. But his solos, while technically perfect, rarely rose above the mundane.

Things improved when the two-man horn section started cooking. Trumpeter Rashawn Ross (who joined in 2006) and sax player Jeff Coffin (who replaced the late LeRoi Moore in ’09), added all sorts of sharp textures, especially during a brilliant New Orleans call-and-response jam during “Jimi Thing.”

But the most impressive improvising came from Matthews himself. Scat singing, psycho-rapping and speaking in tongues, he sounded like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. For a terminally mellow dude who looks like he just rolled out of the futon, he can also bust some serious moves, as he showed with a few bursts of furious freak-dancing.

Playing without an opening act, the band got the show rolling slowly with an hour-long acoustic set as the sun was still shining. Chatty fans all but ruined the band’s cover of the Rodriguez ballad “Sugar Man,” and Ross and Coffin sounded disjointed on “Ants Marching.” But when the horns clicked in “So Damn Lucky,” the acoustic set took on the dreamy vibe of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.

As night fell, the band went electric for a long set sprinkled with hits (“Satellite,” “You and Me”), lesser known tunes (2012’s “Belly Belly Nice”) and ending with the band’s trademark whisper-to-a-squall cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” But the night’s most enjoyable remake was Prince’s R-rated funk workout “Sexy M.F.” – if nothing else, for the sheer amusement of watching a sea of clean-cut fans trying to shake the collective junk in their trunks.

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